"Good, ask your partner what the plate says," he said.
The second officer was a woman, younger, dark hair pulled back tight, and she was out of her car before it had settled on its springs. Her hand was on the radio at her shoulder, and she was not walking the way the first officer had walked. She was walking like someone listening to something.
The radio answered before she reached them. The dispatcher's voice came through scratchy and broken, half of it lost to static and the hum of the canopy, but the shape of it carried in the warm air, and Marcus heard it, and the officer holding his shoulder heard it, and the young woman with her phone pressed to the glass heard it too.
"—on that silver Camry, Illinois plate, vehicle comes back as a rental, Tri-County Auto Rental out of the regional airport. Current renter is Marcus Bellamy, Indianapolis, Indiana. No wants, no warrants. Not—" static "—not the vehicle on the BOLO. Repeat, not your BOLO vehicle."
Nobody said anything.
The light bar kept turning. Marcus turned his head and looked at the officer, and in each lens of the man's aviators he saw it: two small rooms of red, then blue, then red, spinning and spinning, and behind them nothing at all—no eyes, nothing he could reach. The mustache did not move. The hand on Marcus's shoulder did not move. The officer's mouth stayed shut, and the silence went on long enough that Marcus could hear the pump beside him ticking as it cooled, and a truck on the highway downshifting for the hill, and his own heart.
He let it go on one breath longer than he needed to, so the man would have to stand in it.
Then Marcus said, "Now tell me why I'm still wearing that cuff."
II
Maribel Santos had been listening since the Route 9 overpass.
She'd been rolling back into town from a fender-bender by the grain co-op when Dale's voice came over the air, short and flat the way it always was—"One-Adam-Four, out at the Sunrise, possible on the BOLO vehicle"—and she had waited for the rest of it. The plate. The request for a return. The ordinary music of a stop. It didn't come. Dispatch asked, "One-Adam-Four, do you have a plate for me?" Nothing. Eight years on the job, six of them in Merritt, and she knew Dale Rusk's radio habits the way she knew the potholes on Grand Avenue. He called things in late and he called them in short, and he did not like a voice in a box telling him what order to do things in.
She had lit up and pushed it. She was less than a minute out. When her headlights swung across the lot and landed on the back of the silver car, she was already keying the mic, reading the plate off the bumper before her wheels stopped—"One-Adam-Seven, run Illinois Charlie-Victor-seven-one-four-zero-three"—and through her windshield she watched the second cuff close on a man in a light-blue shirt who had his face turned toward her as if he had been waiting for her specifically.
Now the return had come, and there was only the turning of the lights, and Dale not moving.
She had been his trainee, fourteen weeks in his passenger seat while he taught her how to stand at a driver's window—bladed, hand near the weapon but not on it, eyes on the hands. He had taught her to write a report as if it would be read by a jury that hated her. He had taught her that the worst thing you could do in front of a citizen was look unsure. He was a good teacher. That was what she kept running into in the six seconds after the man's question: Dale had been a good teacher, and he had taught her this, too, without ever saying it—that once you put your hand on a man, you had to have been right to.
"Dale," she said.
He didn't turn. The lights went round in his glasses.